“Improbable” doesn’t quite capture the political significance of Zohran Mamdani becoming mayor-elect of New York City. The left is not supposed to win capitalist elections, at least not big ones like this. And not in America, where corporate power’s grip on politics is more vice-like than anywhere else on Earth. 
Yet, while his victories this year might appear to be something out of the blue—and at odds with the triumphant moment the right is having, which is reshaping the US and much of Europe—this moment has been building for some time. A decade ago, we wrote in these pages of the insurgent US presidential primary campaign of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, who, like Mamdani, was running on a democratic socialist platform:
“Something is happening in the United States. The political landscape is being transformed, though just how widely, deeply or permanently is still unclear ... It seems improbable that [Sanders] will defeat the machine of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ... But even if he ultimately fails, you get the sense that a genie has been let out of a bottle. The genie is not Sanders himself ... but the sentiment that he has tapped ...
“Anger with the economic and political system has found a left-wing electoral expression, which is unlike anything seen in the US in generations. Whether it can be cohered into a movement to rebuild the left is another question. But there definitely is hope that it might.”
Ultimately, the Sanders insurgency was unsuccessful. In the following years, the senator went on to betray the aspirations that he stoked, and the revolutionary left imploded just as it might have seized the moment to build something independent of the Democratic Party. These are cautionary tales for the Mamdani moment. 
Nevertheless, the broad shift in consciousness has continued. It was evident at the end of 2015 and became clearer as the presidential primaries unfolded the following year. The political establishments of both the Democrats and the Republicans were facing significant blowback from their left and right bases, respectively. 
Since then, the political polarisation in the United States and elsewhere has intensified, although it has been expressed somewhat asymmetrically; at least in the electoral sphere, the far right has made most of the running. That’s reflected in its leaders’ surnames gaining worldwide recognition: Trump, Meloni, Modi, Farage, Le Pen, Wilders, Milei. 
Everywhere, far-right organisations have been bankrolled by billionaires and masses of smaller capitalists while receiving free and positive publicity from sections of the reactionary corporate media. They have built a base among the personnel of the repressive arms of the state, such as the police and the military, and more broadly among the population by dishonestly selling their reactionary pro-capitalist programs as some form of “people power”.
New York has now kicked back. Young working-class people have reacted to the consolidation of Trumpism, to ongoing economic hardship, to the new holocaust in Gaza, to the victimisation of undocumented migrants and the Gestapo-like raids being carried out across the country, and to the capitalist establishment’s complicity in it all. 
A member of the Democratic Socialists is about to take the reins of global finance’s most important city. A Palestine solidarity activist who rejects the idea of a Jewish state has succeeded in the heart of liberal Zionism. A 34-year-old who said that billionaires shouldn’t exist has won the metropolis that is home to the most billionaires on the planet. 
However, the main thing is that Mamdani’s victory came on the back of more than 100,000 volunteers and the city’s largest voter turnout in over half a century. This astonishing mobilisation reflects a very positive shift in political consciousness. 
Most of the mainstream commentary, naturally, focuses on Mamdani himself—his political talents, his campaigning acumen and his identity. From the left, numerous criticisms can and should be made of his increasing embrace of the establishment that he purports to oppose. Some of these were foreshadowed in <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/fairytale-of-new-york">the Red Flag editorial</a> following his victory in the primaries. Lance Selfa, writing from Chicago, <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/trump-cops-a-pasting-in-us-election-rebuke">outlines the subsequent developments</a>.
Nevertheless, this is a moment to grasp—New York has electrified people across the globe because they can see an alternative to the status quo in a world that is totally stacked against us. Increasingly over the last decade or so, that alternative has been given a name: “socialism”. This sea change in sensibilities is astounding. From a ridiculed word, it has again become the menace of the political right and the hope of millions.
That is something to be built on.

Editors

The Mamdani moment

There isn’t much to explain about the result of the off-year US elections on 4 November. In virtually every election held in every district and every state, Democrats improved on their performance in last year’s presidential election. And in many places, they exceeded their most optimistic predictions.
“No Kings” went to the polls.
In New Jersey, expectations of a close election melted before Democratic gubernatorial candidate Mikie Sherrill’s 13-percentage-point victory. In New York City, Democratic Socialists of America member Zohran Mamdani won a majority of votes in a four-way race for mayor amidst the highest turnout in the city’s mayoral election since 1969.
The Democratic sweep wasn’t confined only to liberal strongholds like New York City or California. Mississippi Democrats managed to break the Republican super-majority in the state Senate. Two Georgia Democrats won election to the state’s public utility commission, marking the first time in twenty years that Democrats won a statewide race for state office. 
<a href="https://www.citizensvoice.com/2025/11/04/democrats-regain-majority-on-luzerne-county-council-flip-4-seats/">Democrats turfed out local officials in conservative areas like Luzerne County, Pennsylvania</a>, considered a bellwether county for a Trumpist future. The right-wing city council member who promoted the Trump-amplified lie that Venezuelan gangs had taken over apartment buildings in <a href="https://sentinelcolorado.com/orecent-headlines/aurora-vote-2025-election-night-results/">Aurora, Colorado, received a well-deserved ejection from her seat</a>.
The explanation for the rout is simple. Voters wanted to voice opposition to Trump, and to support Democratic pledges to improve affordability. That was the winning message for Democratic candidates, whether the messenger was a self-described moderate or a social democrat.
According to opinion polls, President Trump is more unpopular now than Joe Biden was when Democratic Party mandarins forced him out of the 2024 presidential race. Clearly, millions went to the polls to vote against Trump. Second, Trump’s 2024 promises to lower prices on necessities have not been fulfilled. Trump’s policies, such as his across-the-board tariffs and cuts to health-care subsidies, are raising prices.
The <a href="https://www.wsj.com/politics/elections/economic-anger-once-again-punishes-the-party-in-power">economic and political headwinds</a> that pushed against Kamala Harris and the Democrats a year ago are now blowing against Trump and the Republicans. <a href="https://internationalsocialism.net/its-the-economy-stupid/">In 2024, it was “the economy, stupid”</a> and in 2025, it still is. Only now, Trump and the GOP are the target for voters’ frustrations—as Harris and Democrats were in 2024.
In 2024, voters who took a chance on Trump could tell themselves that he would, as he said, “bring down prices on day one” and that his deportation plan would focus on “violent criminals”. Since January, however, they have seen that Trump’s policies have served corrupt oligarchs and that federal goons are abducting day labourers and childcare workers off the streets. For these reasons, <a href="https://www.gelliottmorris.com/p/seven-data-driven-takeaways-from">2024 Republican gains with young voters and with Latinos have evaporated</a>.
Even GOP “culture wars” couldn’t save it. The Republican candidate for Virginia’s governorship spent millions on anti-trans ads. She lost by 14 points.
In California, more than 8 million voters turned out to endorse Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom’s plan to redraw the state’s congressional maps to provide Democrats the opportunity to win five additional seats in Congress in the 2026 midterm election. Newsom touted this measure as “fighting fire with fire” against the governments of Texas and other Republican-led states who are trying to gerrymander their congressional maps to insulate Republicans from a building wave to throw them out of office.
Liberals are cheering the overwhelming victory (by a margin of almost 2-to-1) of the Newsom-backed Proposition 50. To them, Newsom deserves credit because his partisan ruthlessness broke the usual mould of Democratic Party fecklessness against Trump and the GOP. But from a socialist point of view, a manoeuvre to elect more Democrats shouldn’t be a cause for celebration.
<a href="https://internationalsocialism.net/lessons-of-election-2024/">The Democrats remain a capitalist party whose dedication to the status quo laid the groundwork for the horrors that Trump is enacting today</a>. In 2024, Kamala Harris touted her “tough on the border” credentials and defended the Biden administration’s abetting of Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza. A generation of Democratic Party support for the neoliberal policy agenda that destroyed labour unions and immiserated millions opened the way for Trump.
Even today, after their landslide victories, the “centrist” Democratic governors-elect in New Jersey and Virginia won’t commit to basic policies to support working people. Mikie Sherrill, governor-elect in New Jersey, has yet to say whether she will extend the state’s law preventing its <a href="https://boltsmag.org/immigration-and-new-jersey-governor-election/">law enforcement from collaborating with federal immigration authorities</a>. Abigail Spanberger, Virginia’s governor-elect, has already said she won’t support repealing the state’s <a href="https://www.virginiascope.com/spanberger-splits-the-middle-on-right-to-work-opposes-full-repeal/">anti-union “right to work” law</a>.
Electing more Democrats doesn’t guarantee support for democracy or for working people, any more than decades of Democratic super-majorities in California have produced affordable housing or <a href="https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-05-16/single-payer-healthcare-meets-its-fate-again-in-the-face-of-californias-massive-budget-deficit">single-payer health care</a>. For all their election campaign rhetoric about “standing with working people”, the Democrats have no plan, nor vision, that can combat Trumpism’s appeal to cynicism for politicians who talk a good game but don’t do anything to improve ordinary people’s lives.
In this political wasteland, Zohran Mamdani, the 34-year-old mayor-elect of New York City, stands out as something different and fresh. It’s not just that he cited socialist hero Eugene Debs in <a href="https://jacobin.com/2025/11/zohran-mamdani-election-victory-speech">his victory speech</a>. Or that he ran a clever social media-driven campaign that embraced New York’s immigrant diversity. Or that he dared Donald Trump: “To get to any of us, you will have to get through all of us”. It’s that he captured the hopes of millions who expect him to stand up for them against the billionaire oligarchs.
Mamdani’s relentless focus on affordability in one of the US’s least affordable cities inspired tens of thousands of volunteers to canvass for him, and more than 1 million to turn out for him against the decrepit Democratic Party establishment that couldn’t stop him. 
Mamdani focused his campaign on a simple set of promises, including pledges to freeze rents, make bus rides free and open city-owned grocery stores. Mamdani’s message resonated widely especially among younger and immigrant voters in New York.
What can we expect from his administration? JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon called Mamdani a “Marxist” “pushing the same ideological mush that means nothing in the real world”. In fact, Mamdani’s transition team relies on professionals who have worked in the last three New York City administrations.
Despite all the ridiculous rhetoric branding him as a dangerous radical, Mamdani’s proposals are modest. Mamdani and his supporters in the DSA openly embrace the early <a href="https://jacobin.com/2025/06/mamdani-mayor-socialism-nyc-strategy/">1900s model of “sewer socialism”</a>. This moniker originated as a put-down of Socialist Party city officials who eschewed radical politics in favour of humdrum provision of city services. 
But the reformers who implemented it—especially in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the bastion of some of the most conservative Socialists—chose to embrace “sewer socialism”. To them, “socialism” meant running “clean” (not corrupt) governments that delivered public services. This type of city administration is clearly preferable to corrupt cronyism, but it’s hardly the stuff of the transition to socialism.
Moreover, Mamdani endorsed policies, like loosening regulations on small businesses and land use, that dovetail with <a href="https://www.semafor.com/article/06/04/2025/at-welcomefest-centrist-democrats-pick-a-fight-with-the-left">so-called “abundance” agenda that is all the rage with “centrist” neoliberal Democrats</a>. Last September—before he announced his run for mayor—he met with Kathy Wylde, a leader of the city’s business elite. Wylde told the Wall Street Journal
that “[Mamdani] said, ‘Look, I’m not in favour of government taking over your business ... He made clear that he’s not anticapitalist in that sense”.
Two of his proposals—appointing members of the city’s Rent Stabilization Board committed to his pledge to freeze rents and fare-free buses—are within his power to implement as mayor. In fact, the previous liberal Democratic Mayor Bill deBlasio implemented similar rent-stabilisation policies. His plan for city-owned groceries is a pilot project aimed at providing one store in each borough as a “proof of concept”. In a city of more than 8 million, this is hardly a threat to the retail grocery sector.
His more ambitious proposals, such as universal pre-kindergarten education, will require approval from New York state for the taxes to fund them. But here’s where Mamdani’s agenda will run up against other forces in the Democratic Party determined to coopt him or to break him.
In his runs for office, Mamdani has always run as a Democrat. This may provide DSA-backed candidates with a more ready-made electorate, but it also makes them captive inside a capitalist party. Not wanting to be ostracised from people who hold influence over their agenda or their advancement leads candidates to make concessions to the mainstream that undercut their independence or even their ability to deliver for their supporters. This process helps to turn <a href="https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/07/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-is-just-a-regular-old-democrat-now.html">nominal socialists into “regular old Democrats”</a>. 
We’ve already seen that process taking shape with Mamdani. <a href="https://www.laborpolitics.com/p/zohrans-historic-win-16-takeaways">Social democrat Eric Blanc may</a> consider Mamdani’s rejection of “defunding the police” (a goal that Blanc called “performative ultraleftism”) as a brilliant stroke to avoid having to answer multiple “gotchas” from reporters and pro-cop trolls. But it’s not going to help him deal with the NYPD, a resource-sucking army that will declare war on him the minute he tries to take any action to curtail its abuses.
In a meeting with executives in the Partnership for New York, the city’s de facto chamber of commerce, Mamdani said he was open to retaining the current police commissioner<a href="https://www.wsj.com/politics/elections/mamdani-clarifies-globalize-the-intifada-stance-in-meeting-with-business-elites-">, Jessica Tisch (daughter of Leow’s billionaire CEO James Tisch)</a>. At the same meeting, he also pledged to discourage activists from using the slogan “globalise the intifada”, a phrase which has been the pretence for multiple attacks on him, <a href="https://inthesetimes.com/article/zohran-mamdani-adl-antisemitism-intifada-bogus-scandal-nyc">even though he has said repeatedly that he doesn’t use it</a>.
What will hold Mamdani to fulfil his promises to working-class supporters, especially when he faces opposition from Wall Street, the police or establishment political forces? His supporters look to the army of canvassers his campaign mobilised. <a href="https://jacobin.com/2025/06/mamdani-victory-hope-nyc-election">As Liza Featherstone put it</a>, “the mass movement that elected him must be prepared to help him succeed, as the ruling class (especially the real estate industry), the Trump administration, and the police make every effort to make his mayoralty a failure”.
While this is theoretically possible, it has almost never happened. There are too many differences between the mechanics of an electoral campaign and a social movement needed to win reforms. Marxists have long contended that elections are the “lowest form” of politics, not requiring the type of political commitment or mobilisation that a true social movement entails.
There’s also the compromised position that someone like Mamdani, as chief executive officer of a city and boss of hundreds of thousands of city workers, will face. First, he will have to staff an administration, undoubtedly pulling many grassroots activists into the government. That means many who could be pressuring the government from the “outside” will be on the “inside”, defending the mayor’s agenda instead.
Will the nominal boss of the NYPD use his office to mobilise protests when the police brutalise or murder someone on his watch? Will the CEO and employer of teachers and other city workers support them if they strike against austerity? Will his administration arrest and prosecute Trump’s immigration goons for civil rights abuses? To ask these questions is to be clear-eyed about developments that will put Mamdani’s brand of “municipal socialism” to the test.

Lance Selfa

Trump cops a pasting in US election rebuke

“‘Palestine will free us all’—you know this slogan, right?” Michael Letwin, a co-founder of US solidarity group Labor for Palestine, was speaking with the enthusiasm of a recent convert, despite his decades of activism, over tea and coffee in Brooklyn’s Iris cafe last year. 
It was some time in May, and northerly gusts whipping off the East River still sent occasional chills through the city, even as summer threatened to burst through the spring. Letwin wasn’t making small talk about the weather, though; he wanted to stress a shift in New York’s political climate. As students in Palestine solidarity encampments across the city were being slandered and smashed by authorities, their defiance seemed only to grow. 
“The activists aren’t going through ‘stages’”, he said, referring to their political consciousness. “It’s more akin to something like ‘permanent revolution’—they are leaping over the old liberal progressive consensus and drawing much more radical, even revolutionary, conclusions.”
I was a little sceptical, having been in Hong Kong five years earlier, embedded in <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QM7N9XICfes">the siege of the Polytechnic</a>, when police faced seemingly endless volleys of Molotov cocktails, petrol bombs, bricks and arrows from the city’s massive student movement. Almost everywhere across the city bore scars of a dramatic mood shift mobilised ferociously against the government—graffiti, boarded-up banks and shops, excavated footpaths, smashed signal boxes and traffic lights. 
New York, by contrast, appeared totally unaffected as an urban space and broadly indifferent. You wouldn’t have known there was a movement unless you walked onto the campuses or stumbled into one of the demonstrations. Of course, I was comparing apples and oranges. Hong Kong’s rage manifested as a scream of physical confrontations everywhere, but without a noticeably commensurate lifting in the political level of the participants. 
At any rate, despite my unspoken misgivings, it wasn’t hard to get caught up in the excitement of the New York campuses, where spectacular things certainly were happening. And Letwin wasn’t the only person talking about a momentous political shift—anyone with a long history on the left, and particularly Jewish leftists, all were saying similar things: Gaza had precipitated a generational crisis within liberal Zionism, the effects of which would be far ranging.
It has been striking since then to watch the decline of the street-based Palestine solidarity movement in Israel’s key supporter. The resistance has been bigger in countries that matter far less than America: Australia, Italy, the UK, for example. Yet it’s clear now that Palestine didn’t disappear as an issue, and possibly played out in the New York mayoral election in ways that were not so evident from afar. John Ganz, a left-wing writer based in New York, <a href="https://www.unpopularfront.news/p/thoughts-on-a-victory">writes in his Unpopular Front newsletter</a>:
“Israel’s place in American politics was more the unquestioned status quo than ideological, even for many Jews ... Then there was Gaza. Suddenly, all those activists didn’t seem so crazy after all. Maybe they had a point—or two. And so Mamdani’s views [that Israel ought to be a democratic state with equal rights for Palestinians] rapidly go from being an eccentric force in American politics to a central one. It wasn’t so much that the election was a referendum on Palestine, Israel, or, even less, the Jews, as some race baiters want us to believe, but that Mamdani now sounded reasonable and attached to reality, while the people who were defending Israel tooth and nail and calling everyone else antisemites and terrorists now sounded like the wild-eyed ideologues.”
That is, Palestine as a signal of political sanity. Perhaps even more than this, Mamdani’s stance might have become a signal to people that he was genuinely different from other politicians in other ways. “When pressured to temper his criticisms of Israel, Mamdani has barely flinched”, <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-local-correspondents/the-mamdani-era-begins">Eric Lach writes in the New Yorker</a>. “These qualities convinced many young voters, in particular, that he might have what it takes to follow through on his promises.”
While bread and butter issues appear to be the singular driving force of the campaign, Palestine figures here not as a background foreign policy issue irrelevant to running a city, but as a bellwether for political character. It not only played a role as a moral question that helped drive the young volunteer mobilisation but as an indication of political spine and integrity that pushed up Mamdani’s vote. 
After all, someone who can withstand the unending and vicious barrage of the Zionist movement surely has a shot at tackling a rental crisis, delivering free child care and buses, and taking two cents on the dollar in tax from incomes above $1 million—none of which are likely to be as ferociously denounced as the call for equality in Palestine. 
In this sense, “Palestine will free us all” suggests something akin to a revelation about the operations of capitalism and the nature of mainstream politics: Gaza shows that the rule of naked, brutal, unapologetic power is ubiquitous. The jettisoning of reason, the silencing of arguments and the resort to brute force are happening not only “over there”, but are mirrored in day-to-day establishment politics, and in the marginalisation of people speaking the truth in workplaces, campuses and the public sphere everywhere. 
Michael Letwin and others, then, might have been proven right, not only about New York’s spring being more than a seasonal change, but about how Palestine became central to even local politics, albeit in ways that many would not have predicted.

Ben Hillier

Did Palestine set New York free?

SANTIAGO—Only six years ago, the left in Latin America was hailing the estallido social (social explosion) in Chile as a marker of a continental resurgence in the class struggle. Similar developments were occurring in Ecuador.
Fast forward to this year, and Ecuador’s leader, Daniel Noboa, was one of three Latin American presidents to attend Donald Trump’s inauguration in Washington, along with Argentina’s Javier Milei and El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele. Milei has just claimed a victory in the midterm elections and is preparing to extend the workday to twelve hours and make holiday leave an employer prerogative. Most emblematically, the political party-movement that for many represented the hopes of a sustained resurgence of popular struggles and a left political alternative, the Movement for Socialism (MAS) in Bolivia, has completely imploded.
With the Cochabamba rebellion in 2000, the emergent political movement in Bolivia had re-awakened the left’s imagination and put the issue of movements “taking power” back on the debate stage. Bolivia became an international reference point. John Holloway’s Change the World Without Taking Power played out in all its messiness on this stage. In its early days, the MAS’s “democratic and cultural revolution” was celebrated as the success of a new model. In the 2009 elections, the MAS won 64 percent of the votes, which was unheard of in Bolivian political history. Then it won 61 percent in 2014 and a still convincing 55 percent in 2020. 
In August, the MAS lost 73 seats, leaving it with two in a lower house of 130. Bolivia is now back on the merry-go-round, like Brazil and Peru, of alternating centre-left and far-right regimes trying to resuscitate the neoliberal model. In Peru, the far-right-dominated coalition is taking no chances. On 24 October, the judiciary sentenced leftist congressional representative Guillermo Bermejo to fifteen years in prison for allegedly having ties to leaders of Shining Path, an outlawed guerrilla organisation. Bermejo was emerging as a potential presidential challenger. 
Enter Chile, Latin America’s model neoliberal regime and origin story of capitalist shock treatment economics under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-89). For decades, Chile has been lauded by neoliberal ideologues for its so-called economic stability, market freedoms, competitiveness and innovation. The country boasts the highest GDP per capita in Latin America and is one of just four continental members of the World Bank’s high-income category. The 2025 Allianz Global Wealth Report ranks Chile 34th in the world, above Mexico (43rd), Brazil (45th), Colombia (49th), Peru (51st) and Argentina (55th).
Chile encapsulates the meaning of neoliberal “success”. In plain language, you find something that the national economy can produce and profitably sell on the world market, you squeeze the working class for every possible cent to maximise productivity, and bingo, economic growth (for some). Chile’s extractivist economy—highly specialised in and dependent on copper and lithium exports—has maintained high growth rates at the expense of manufacturing, and with a susceptibility to commodity price fluctuations and a generally weak currency, leading to high import prices.
The result of this neoliberal “success” is that Chile remains one of the most unequal countries in the world: only 28 of 151 countries with data collected in the World Inequality Database present worse than Chile. The richest 10 percent own 80 percent of all national wealth; the top 1 percent own half. Almost half of Chilean workers earn less than 600,000 pesos monthly, equivalent to less than A$1,000. Only 5 percent of workers earn more than A$4,000 a month. Yet the cost of living is not far off Australia, a litre of milk here setting you back around A$2. In addition, unemployment, at 8.5 percent, is high even by Latin American standards, and 26.2 per cent of employment is in the informal sector.
Not surprisingly, Chile’s “success” comes with permanent volatility—and not just economic. Working-class history here is steeped in struggle. Over the course of a century, it birthed several mass party organisations influenced or led by Marxists: the Communist Party, the Socialist Party, the Revolutionary Left Movement, and the Popular Unitary Action Movement, to name a few.
This history casts a shadow over capitalist stability, so much so that post-dictatorship neoliberalism has relied on the calming influence of centre-left governments, which have held six out of eight presidencies since 1990. The two Pinochetista presidencies of Sebastián Piñera (2010-14 and 2018-22) both fuelled important estallidos sociales: the mass student-led protests of 2011 and the even bigger explosion of 2019, which demanded a new constitution. Both governments controlled by the traditional right in these years generated institutional crises for Chilean capitalism.
Chile heads into presidential elections this month with a sense of trepidation. On the one hand, the right has been gaining ground since the defeat of the 2019 estallido’s aspirations: while 80 percent of voters in an October 2020 plebiscite supported constitutional change, only 38 percent voted for the proposed new constitution the following year. Once students and the working class had been demobilised, the right took the initiative.
Since former student leader Gabriel Boric was elected president in 2022, the political situation has worsened. His centre-left government’s tepidness has increasingly emboldened the traditional right and invited the growth of a new radical far right. A recently published survey suggests that, in the five years since the estallido, the proportion of people identifying with right-wing ideas has increased from 18 percent to 38 percent. The shift is fundamentally due to the centre-left’s association with neoliberal politics sprinkled with piecemeal, symbolic and inadequate social measures.
Dissatisfaction with centre-left politics manifested clearly in the June primaries organised by the ruling centre-left block. The Communist Party’s candidate, Jeanette Jara (minister for labour and social provision in Boric’s government), trounced her main opposition, Carolina Tohá (from the Party for Democracy, a right-wing split from the Socialist Party) and Gonzalo Winter (from Boric’s Broad Front). Jara’s 60 percent reflected aspirations for a more decisive left-wing program.
In the historical spirit of the Communist Party, fearing a radicalisation that would split the Popular Front with the bourgeois political parties that are part of the current government, Jara’s campaign since June has largely followed the agenda set by the right. She has emphasised her anti-immigration and public security credentials while wooing the most right-wing elements in the governing coalition, in particular the Christian Democrats.
Jara will win the first round of the presidential elections but will likely face one of three right-wing candidates in the run-off: Evelyn Matthei, the candidate of the Independent Democratic Union, representing the traditional, unreconstructed Pinochetista right and a mirror political reflection of the Chilean capitalist class; José Antonio Kast, from the far-right Republican Party; or Johannes Kaiser, founder of the radical far-right National Libertarian Party, styled along Trump and Milei lines but arguably more offensive.
Regardless of her opponent, Jara will come armed with a blunt instrument: a centre-left program incapable of fundamentally tackling the country’s social and economic problems and bound to a government associated with growing unemployment and underemployment, social spending cuts and the repression of mobilised opposition.
Jara’s opposition will be armed with a far-right, populist agenda that claims to understand the general discontent and promises a new, shinier nationalism, robed in racist anti-immigrant rhetoric, and blaming everyone but the capitalist class for the country’s problems.
In the global context of authoritarianism becoming the new normal of capitalist democracy, a victorious far right will double down on every channel of exploitation (pushing down wages, pensions and social spending) with a confidence that will not spare state repression, aiming to isolate the more politically advanced sections of the working class. If Jara wins, it will be “más de lo mismo” (more of the same), a continuing weight holding down the radicalisation of larger contingents of the working class, unable to resolve the problems borne of a model of accumulation nearing exhaustion, and fanning the spread of far-right ideas.
If Chile does elect a “communist” president, it will not signal any major change. However, it will create new contradictions and opportunities for the revolutionary left. The Communist Party is not the post-Marxist left of the Broad Front. The CP’s history, especially its role in the anti-dictatorship movement in the 1980s, ties it to a political memory that the new left cannot claim. That political memory is an important glue shared by the working class’s more combative and radicalised elements. Every high school and university student protest, every major workers’ struggle, all manifest this political memory.
This combativeness has barely got a look in during the presidential elections, bar the propagandistic interventions of the Trotskyist Revolutionary Workers Party, running 23 candidates in the parliamentary elections, and the Maoist Chilean Communist Party (Proletarian Action), whose presidential candidate has raised demands such as the nationalisation of the mines, an issue the centre-left won’t touch but which is critical to any meaningful left governmental program.
If Chile elects a far-right president, it will encourage the hawkish sensibilities of the Trump administration. US imperialism hopes to regain influence in Latin America in order to boost its global pretensions. An alignment of far-right governments in Chile, Argentina, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia might even give a green light to the unimaginable—a US intervention in Venezuela. That would be a particularly complicated endeavour given that the Venezuelan military is not a ready-made proxy for imperialism.
The challenge for the revolutionary movement continent-wide is to build influence amid the instability of a spent economic model that creates a merry-go-round of governments, dissolving previously long-lasting parties and alliances, creating monsters in an instant, and seemingly scattering political memory in the whirlwind.
It’s a challenge that must be accepted.

Jorge Jorquera

The resurgent right in Latin America and the challenge for revolutionaries

The WA Socialists achieved a solid result in their first electoral foray—into local council elections, which were completed on 18 October. Despite launching only in June this year, the party ran ten candidates across eight local councils, with grassroots campaigns concentrated in Bayswater, Canning and Fremantle. 
In Bayswater’s South ward, teacher Lewis Todman finished second with 15.8 percent of first preference votes. Also finishing second was nurse Rachel Goldsbrough in Canning’s Mason ward, with 24 percent. Finally, Nick Everett—longtime socialist and secretary of Friends of Palestine WA—finished third in Fremantle’s East ward with 19.7 percent of the vote. 
Among them, these campaigns mobilised more than 100 volunteers, many of whom were on the hustings for the first time. Together they knocked on 18,000 doors and spent countless hours getting the word out to voters. The message was straightforward: residents deserve a council that will put the interests of people ahead of the profits of developers and big business. 
This means, among other things, that councils should use their power to tackle the cost of living and housing crises head on. WA Socialists candidates argued for expanding or in some cases setting up council-run services, ranging from child care to aged care. Candidates also called for increasing council rates on vacant homes and for increased investment in community spaces. 
Over the course of the campaign, candidates also took up the big political issues. In Cockburn and Fremantle, we argued against the transformation of Perth’s southwestern suburbs into a hub for the AUKUS alliance. And in every ward, WA Socialists candidates argued for local governments to take up the issue of the genocide in Gaza. 
This message found an audience beyond those reached by our volunteers. With little more than a candidate statement sent out to voters along with their ballots, WA Socialists candidate Zoe Stevens won 17.7 percent of first preference votes in Armadale’s River ward. In Cockburn, where the field was heavily contested, Grace Redfern finished fourth out of eight with 10.1 percent of first preferences. With most other WA Socialists candidates winning between 7 and 10 percent of the vote in similar circumstances, it’s clear there’s an audience for socialist politics in WA. 
We can’t be content, though, with a couple of thousand people reading our policy and voting for us. We need more active socialists to keep up the fight for all the things we argued for in this election and to continue to establish WA Socialists as a radical left alternative to the political mainstream.

Christopher MacFarlane

Impressive result for socialists in WA council elections

On a sunny Saturday in September, more than two dozen volunteers gathered at a park in Samson, in Perth’s south. As on many afternoons and weekends before, they were meeting there to doorknock for the WA Socialists’ candidate in the City of Fremantle council election. Between them on that day, they managed to knock on more than 1,000 doors, talking to voters about local issues and making the case to vote to elect a socialist to the council.
Victorian Socialists members voted in June to expand their electoral project across Australia, and the WA Socialists was launched in July. It immediately found an audience among those who were eager for a left-wing alternative to the parlous state of politics in Western Australia. Since then, more than 500 people have signed up, and many have gotten active in the council campaign—with good reason.
WA is possibly the worst state in Australia in which to be a renter. According to a recent report from the Bankwest Curtin Economics Centre, the median weekly rent in WA has increased by 76 percent since 2020 and now sits at $740. Anglicare WA’s 2025 Rental Affordability Snapshot found not one single room in the whole of the state, let alone a property, is affordable for people on Jobseeker, youth allowance or the disability support pension.
Investment in public housing has been criminally low. As of May 2025, there were 21,480 current applications for social housing. If you’re one of those applicants, you can expect to wait on average 148 weeks, or just under three years. And in its recent budget, the Cook Labor government wound up several key cost-of-living relief measures, such as electricity credits.
While workers and the poor are struggling, for those at the top it’s a boom time. According to the Department of Jobs, Tourism, Science and Innovation, WA’s iron ore sector generated $128 billion in sales in 2024, of which $36 billion was profit. And politicians themselves are among the winners. They were recently awarded a 4 percent pay rise, increasing a backbencher’s annual pay to $173,393. For comparison, the starting salary for a WA state school teacher is $78,397. 
It’s in the context of this one-sided class war being waged by the rich and their political servants that WA Socialists has embarked on its first serious campaign. Council elections are taking place across the state in October, in most places by postal ballot. With a total of ten candidates running across eight council areas in Perth, the party has presented voters with a genuine, fighting, anti-capitalist platform—proudly taking up issues like housing, the environment, workers’ rights and solidarity with global struggles like that for peace and justice for Palestine. 
Nick Everett, the WA Socialists’ candidate for East Ward in Fremantle, is a long-time socialist activist, former chair of Friends of Palestine WA and a union delegate. In Fremantle, wealth and poverty often rub shoulders. The median rent for a house has increased by nearly 60 percent in the last five years, and public housing levels have sharply declined, replaced with expensive new apartments. 
The state government plans to relocate Fremantle’s 100-year-old port, shedding hundreds of local jobs and destroying the heart of the community. Everett and the WA Socialists are firmly opposed to this, as well as to the plan to turn the nearby suburb of Cockburn into a base for US nuclear submarines as part of the AUKUS deal. Fremantle declared itself a nuclear-free zone in the 1980s. Everett wants to keep it that way.
“Fremantle’s identity is being sold off to developers while working-class people are squeezed out”, Everett says. “We need a council that treasures Freo’s unique working-class history and prioritises housing and services for all, not just the rich.”
In Canning in Perth’s east, the dilapidated Brownlie Towers site has sat empty for years despite its potential to provide much-needed public housing. Rachel Goldsbrough, a public hospital nurse and the WA Socialists’ candidate for Mason Ward in Canning, has made the redevelopment of the towers a key part of her platform. “We need 100 percent public housing at Brownlie Towers, and we need it yesterday”, she says. “The government has ignored this project for too long. It’s a disgrace.”
Rents in Canning have skyrocketed by 84 percent in just five years, and council rates were raised by 6 percent this year—among the highest increase in the state. Among other measures to address the housing crisis, Goldsbrough is calling on the council to impose penalties on owners of properties left empty long-term.
In Bayswater in Perth’s north, gentrification is setting in. The median house price in parts of the suburb has risen 70 percent, with many renters evicted to make way for short-term rentals and Airbnbs.
Lewis Todman, a longtime socialist organiser and pre-service teacher, is running as the WA Socialists’ candidate. “If elected, I’ll be the only renter on the Bayswater council”, Todman says. “We need a local government that stands up for the rights of renters, not the rights of Airbnb owners looking to make a buck from the housing crisis.”
Across all campaigns, the issue of Palestine resonates with voters, with many declaring that their vote will go to the WA Socialists on the basis of the party’s unwavering opposition to the war in Gaza.
While doorknocking in Fremantle, a volunteer met Sally, who said she had been a communist in her younger years. At the end of their conversation, Sally went inside her home and returned, handing the volunteer a pin that said “No Conscription”—a relic from her husband’s days as a draft dodger during the Vietnam War. She explained that she had been uplifted and inspired by some of the young people leading the WA Socialists’ campaign and their anti-war stance.
Whatever the results of this election, the WA Socialists project has significant momentum. It has already achieved the membership required to register as a party with the Western Australian Electoral Commission—a task to which it will turn in the coming months. By bringing issues like housing, public services, and global solidarity to letterboxes, doorsteps and community centres, WA Socialists offers a chance to seriously shake the rotten status quo of capitalism in WA and build a movement to win real change.

Miranda Wood

On the campaign trail with WA Socialists

Argentina’s far-right president, Javier Milei, suffered a setback in the elections of the province of Buenos Aires on 7 September. Milei’s La Libertad Avanza (LLA) won in just two of the eight electoral areas in Argentina’s most populous province, home to more than 17 million people or 40 percent of the entire Argentine electorate. With the national mid-term elections due to be held in late October, this was an important test for the government.
Milei came to power in 2023, and immediately implemented a series of draconian anti-protest and anti-strike laws, combined with mass cuts to public spending, large public sector lay-offs and privatisations. During the Buenos Aires provincial election campaign, he promised his supporters, “We’re going to put the final nail in their coffin”, referring to the centrist Peronist opposition. But even Milei could not spin the result into something positive. On election night he struck a very different chord, saying “Without a doubt, on the political front, today we have suffered a clear defeat”.
The major beneficiaries of this defeat are the Peronists, a coalition of various parties from the centre left to centre right. Closely linked to the union bureaucracy, the Peronists have governed Argentina for the majority of the years since its return to democracy in the 1980s, introducing a range of neoliberal measures during that time. The Peronists won 47.3 percent of the vote in Buenos Aires, claiming victory in 100 of the 130 municipalities. LLA, by contrast, won just 33.7 percent. In the two most populous and working-class electoral areas, the Peronists beat Milei’s coalition by 25 and 10 percentage points respectively. 
The strong Peronist vote much more reflects a rejection of Milei’s program than enthusiastic support for the Peronists. In just two years, Milei’s austerity has savaged the living standards of the working class. Last year, the poverty rate reached a record high 54.8 percent. A full 70 percent of people run out of money for monthly expenses by the 20th of the month, according to economist Guillermo Oliveto. Milei dismissed this statistic, saying, “If it were true, you would have to walk down the street and it would be full of corpses”. 
On top of his clear indifference to mass poverty, Milei’s administration has been mired in corruption scandals, which have likely had an impact on some voters who bought into his self-described “anti-elitistism”.
The other encouraging outcome of the election was the strong vote for the Workers’ Left Front (FIT-U), a coalition of far-left socialist parties. Across the province, the FIT-U won 4.3 percent of the total, or 350,000 votes. Electorally, the province is divided into eight areas. In the third and eighth areas, which have respective populations of more than 5 million and 600,000, the FIT-U consolidated itself as the third political force, winning just over 5.5 percent in each. 
In La Matanza, the largest municipality in the country with nearly 2 million people, the FIT-U won 7.5 percent. In other areas, its vote reached between 6 and 8 percent. The strong result means the FIT-U will hold on to its two lower house MPs. The party’s program includes massive expansions of public health and education, nationalisation of key sectors of the economy, putting politicians on a teachers’ wage, cutting regressive taxes and establishing a national jobs program. Its success shows that even a relatively small party, when it puts forward a decent left-wing program, can win a section of workers and students.
Ana Paredes Landman, a teacher, will hold one of the seats for the Socialist Workers’ Movement (MST), one of the four parties that make up the FIT-U. In a statement she pointed to the resistance, led by the left, to Milei’s program as responsible for his defeat:
“There were the workers of the Garrahan (hospital), the disability movements, retirees and so many popular sectors who, with the support of the Left Front, kept the resistance alive while other spaces linked to the union bureaucracy and Peronism chose passivity. The good electoral result of the Left Front marks a recognition of those of us who uphold a consistent proposal, who do not turn our backs and who always defend the rights of workers and youth in the legislatures and in the councils.”
Another important part of the FIT-U’s approach is that it doesn’t just offer an electoral alternative but also actively builds resistance in the streets, university campuses and workplaces. The MST have been leading some of the most high-profile resistance to Milei’s austerity. One example is the Garrahan paediatrics hospital in Buenos Aires. Milei’s attacks on the free and public hospital, which treats 40 percent of Argentina’s paediatric cancer cases, have turned it into a symbol of resistance. The MST is the dominant political force in the Garrahan union. It has led a series of strikes at the hospital and marches on congress—one of which ended with healthcare workers surrounding the congress building. The union general secretary, Norma Lezana, an MST member, has tried to link the Garrahan struggle to the broader struggles of all workers, saying that while their action “is centred on the Garrahan, it includes all the demands of the population ... if the Garrahan wins, and we manage to keep it from closing, that will also be a victory for the entire population”.
Ultimately, the election is an important setback for Milei and his ultra-conservative agenda. While two general strikes and other major industry strikes in the first year of his term stymied some of the most extreme elements of his program, the resistance has become more isolated since then. Only the best organised sections of the working class, often where the socialist left is strong, have kept up the pressure with consistent strikes and protests. 
Nonetheless, the Buenos Aires election shows that the far right’s advance can be checked, and that the centre can make gains electorally against it. While the Peronists and their partners in the union bureaucracy have largely given up the fight against Milei in the streets and workplaces, the presence of a sizeable far left with some weight in key sections of the working class has been crucial in building resistance. 
Unfortunately, the far left is still too small to challenge seriously the influence of the Peronist movement. But for a growing section of workers, it does provide a political alternative capable of leading at least some of them in action. Continuing to build and strengthen a genuinely anti-capitalist movement that reaches further into the working class is the key to challenging seriously both Milei and Peronism.

Tom Sullivan

Setback for far-right Milei and advance for left in Argentina

Since 2012, Chilean elections have involved voluntary primaries, in which parties or coalitions of parties can run regulated polls to elect presidential candidates, parliamentary deputies, senators and mayors.
The left-of-centre Unity for Chile (Unidad por Chile) coalition, which currently forms President Gabriel Boric’s government in the National Congress, held primaries to select a presidential candidate on 29 June. The candidates included Jeannette Jara from the Communist Party (Partido Comunista de Chile, PCCh), Gonzalo Winter from the Broad Front (Frente Amplio), Jaime Mulet from the Social Green Regionalist Federation (Federación Regionalista Verde Social), and Carolina Tohá from the Party for Democracy (Partido por la Democracia, PPD) in partnership with the Socialist Party, the Radical Party and the Liberal Party.
The 20 percent lower turnout for these primaries, compared to the 2021 primaries that led to the selection of Boric, is a clear indicator of the loss of enthusiasm for a government that watered down what progressive agenda it had after the 2022 defeat of its constitutional referendum. Clearer still was the primary vote for Gonzalo Winter, from Boric’s Frente Amplio, who managed only 9 percent. The PPD’s Tohá got 28 percent, based on a barely disguised scare campaign of anti-communism. The Communist Party’s Jeannette Jara won the primaries convincingly across the entire country, with more than 60 percent (825,835 votes).
This is not surprising, as the few reforms the government has celebrated—in pensions, work week and minimum wage—were largely the work of the Communist Party, with Jeannette Jara leading the Ministry for Work and Social Provision. None of the reforms came for free. The 40-hour week and increased minimum wage both involved trade-offs in labour “flexibility”, and the pension reform was more a capitalist modernisation.
The fact that the Communist Party will lead the centre-left’s parliamentary campaign in the upcoming national election signals an important change in the balance of forces and reflects the growing polarisation across the continent. The mainstay of Chile’s post-dictatorship capitalist stability has been the centre-left forces of the neoliberal Socialist Party and PPD, alongside the historically weakened Christian Democrats. The Frente Amplio was always a swamp without a clear social base or ideological commonality.
The Chilean Communist Party is one of the oldest in the world, founded in 1912 as the Socialist Workers Party. It has a long history of supporting what it variously labelled progressive or nationalist bourgeois forces, participating in governments, and standing at the head of workers’ movements only to lead them into defeats, including the persecution of its own members. 
Most tragically, the Communist Party bears significant blame for attempting to demobilise the workers’ movement during the Allende government and weakening it at its most decisive historical moment, before General Augusto Pinochet overthrew the government in a coup in 1973. The Communists were the most conservative, conciliatory section of the Popular Unity coalition, leading attempts to hold back factory takeovers, strike deals with centrist parties and marginalise revolutionary forces.
Throughout this history and to date, it has maintained significant levels of support among workers. The party has the third largest electorally registered membership and, in recent years, has been top of this list. Unlike most other parties, centre-left and right, the PCCh’s 45,000 or so membership is significantly more meaningful, with neighbourhood-level organisation still existent in many parts of the country. 
The PCCh youth organisation probably has more than 6,000 members, who are active at secondary school, university and neighbourhood levels. While this does not compare with the 100,000 organised militants it had in 1972, it is still a significant political force in a country where youth mobilisations have been centre stage for decades. Two of the key figures of the Boric government, Camila Vallejo (government spokesperson and head of education) and Karol Cariola (chair of the lower house), were important leaders of the Jota (as the Communist youth are known).
The Chilean Communist Party has a long Stalinist history and, like many of its counterparts, evolved in a Eurocommunist direction from the late 1960s onwards. However, the defeat of 1973 and the persecution that followed somewhat immunised the party from the precipitous decline and right-wing trajectory of many similar organisations worldwide. By 1984, the PCCh had shifted its perspective, resolving that the most probable road to democracy was a national uprising. It joined with revolutionary forces and, for a period, helped lead the democracy movement. This included setting up armed militias through the Manuel Rodríguez Patriotic Front, famed for the attempted assassination of Pinochet.
While relatively monolithic, the PCCh has its historically rooted tensions. The case of PCCh leader Daniel Jadue illustrates the continuation of these. Jadue, a Chilean of Palestinian origin, was mayor of the working-class Santiago district of Recoleta from 2012 to 2024. He became very popular for opening public pharmacies, popular libraries and an open university and for establishing a public housing builder. He contested the primaries in 2021 against Boric, getting almost 700,000 votes, compared to Boric’s million. 
In 2024, Jadue was charged with crimes related to the funding of the public pharmacies, essentially for buying medicines with non-existent public funds. Since then, the entire political establishment has done everything possible to vilify Jadue and keep him off the political stage, including current efforts to prevent him from running in the coming parliamentary elections. In recent months, the PCCh president has engaged in public squabbles with their presidential candidate over whether Jadue would play a role in the election campaign.
The case of Jadue complicates the support the Jara campaign seeks from the centre of Chilean politics. As in the past, the more the PCCh looks in that direction, the more it plays into the hands of the right. In waiting are presidential candidates Evelyn Matthei, supported by two of Chile’s main modern bourgeois parties, National Renewal (Renovación Nacional) and the Independent Democratic Union (Unión Demócrata Independiente), and Antonio Kast, from the more newly established darling of the far right, the Republican Party.
[Red Flag will report from Chile on the presidential elections in October-November.]

Will a Communist be Chile’s next president?

On the back of strong grassroots campaigns that included many hours of doorknocking and letterboxing and thousands of conversations with voters, Victorian Socialists candidates achieved a solid result in recent by-elections in Darebin and Whittlesea councils in Melbourne’s north. 
The by-election for the North West Ward of Darebin City Council was called following <a href="https://www.darebin.vic.gov.au/About-council/News-and-Media/News/Darebin-City-Council-mourns-the-loss-of-Cr-Gaetano-Greco">the death in April</a> of left-wing independent councillor Gaetano Greco. Greco was first elected to council in 2008 and served as Darebin mayor in 2013-14. He was a strong progressive voice who was a leader of the campaign to save Preston Market from its billionaire owner’s <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/speaking-billionaire-preston-market">profit-seeking redevelopment plan</a>.
Greco was a popular councillor. In the last state-wide council election in October 2024, he <a href="https://www.vec.vic.gov.au/results/council-election-results/2024-council-election-results/darebin-city-council#North%20West%20Ward">won the North West Ward</a> with a first preference vote of 57.8 percent, ahead of Labor’s Geraldine Wood on 20.1 percent, the Greens’ Patchouli Paterson on 12.3 percent and VS candidate Adam Slater on 9.8 percent.
Seven candidates competed to fill his vacant spot, with all but one of those pitching themselves as (various shades of) progressive. VS candidate Cat Rose—a nurse and long-time community activist who has in recent years been part of the Save the Preston Market campaign along with local organising around Palestine—<a href="https://www.vec.vic.gov.au/voting/current-elections/darebin-city-council-north-west-ward-by-election/results">received 14.5 percent of first preference votes</a>, coming in third, behind progressive independent Angela Villella on 27.4 percent and Labor’s Daniel Scoullar on 17.6 percent.
After the distribution of preferences, however, Rose came out ahead of Labor, finishing second on 42.4 percent behind Villlella on 57.6 percent. Villella was one of two candidates whose pitch to voters centred on their connection with Greco and desire to continue in his footsteps (the other was George Kanjere, who received 7.6 percent of first preference votes).
Rose’s first preference vote represents a swing of 4.7 percent from VS’s North West Ward result in 2024. This is a good outcome in a crowded field of progressive candidates. For comparison, the Greens’ first preference vote was down 4.2 percent from 2024.
The by-election for the Lalor Ward in Whittlesea City Council was called after the 2024 election for that ward was voided by the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal due to suspected fraud. During the vote count, which was narrowly won by long-time Labor councillor Stevan Kozmevski, Victorian Electoral Commission staff found that there were a high number of “multiple returns”: numerous postal ballot papers being sent in by a single voter.
Eleven candidates ran in the by-election. VS candidate Omar Hassan—a teacher and long-time Palestine solidarity campaigner who was the party’s candidate for Scullin in the recent federal election—came in second on first preferences with <a href="https://www.vec.vic.gov.au/voting/current-elections/whittlesea-city-council-lalor-ward-by-election/results">15.5 percent of the vote</a>, behind Kozmevski on 22.3 percent. They were followed by a group of three candidates who received between 11 and 12 percent. After the distribution of preferences it was the fifth-placed candidate, Michael Labrador, who received just 11.2 percent of first preferences, who jumped ahead to win with 52.4 percent to Kozmevski’s 47.6 percent. 
It’s difficult to come to any firm political conclusions from this result. Labrador stood on the far-right of the field of candidates, foregrounding his Christian faith and family values and calling for more “fiscal responsibility” from council. As the third-placed candidate on the ballot, though, he benefited from what VS scrutineers said was a significant donkey vote—where voters, not knowing (or not caring) who they should vote for, simply number the boxes starting with “1” for the top-placed candidate and going down the ballot paper from there.
The results for VS provide further evidence for the existence of a decent-sized audience for socialist politics in these areas. Both Lalor and Reservoir (which Darebin North West Ward covers) are heartlands of Melbourne’s multi-ethnic working class that have traditionally been Labor Party strongholds. In many parts of Australia, workers’ disillusionment with Labor is translating into increasing votes for parties on the far-right fringe. To the extent that VS can win a portion of these people to vote for and identify with socialists instead, that in itself will be a positive intervention into Australian political life.
Our aim, however, should be to do much more than that. There’s no indication that we’re approaching a ceiling for the socialist vote in these areas. Socialist organising in places like Lalor and Reservoir is only just getting started. The biggest barrier we face is the pervasive disillusionment with and disengagement from politics, more than any entrenched commitment to Labor or far-right candidates and parties.
If Victorian Socialists can further establish itself as a genuine, radical alternative to the utterly corrupt and pro-big business politics of both Labor and the Liberals, and to the progressive small ‘l’ liberal but ultimately pro-capitalist politics of the Greens and the Teals, there’s every reason to think that the current upward trajectory of its vote (and its membership) will continue and even accelerate. And with the party’s recent decision to expand across Australia, there’s no reason to think this success can’t be replicated in other states and territories too.
James Plested is the Victorian Socialists communications director.

James Plested

Solid result for socialist candidates in local council by-elections

Zohran Mamdani’s successful campaign to become the Democratic Party’s mayoral candidate in New York City struck a chord with many people who want a political alternative to the pro-business, pro-war status quo. 
The task for US socialists is to translate this potential into a real movement capable of winning its demands, cutting down the rich and powerful and advancing a radical world view. Unfortunately, only a month after his shock victory, there are clear signs that Mamdani is moving in the opposite direction. 
With the mayoral election set for November, Mamdani is trying to shore up the support of the city’s business leaders. In closed-door meetings with top executives, he has walked back his statement that “billionaires shouldn’t exist”, equivocated on his plans for a rent freeze and repudiated the pro-Palestine slogan “globalise the intifada”. 
He has distanced himself from past criticisms of the New York Police Department and indicated openness to retaining current police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, a billionaire heir and ardent defender of police murder. Mamdani’s pledge to maintain current NYPD funding levels is no small problem for a candidate who harnessed the hopes of anti-racists and Palestine solidarity activists. The NYPD is a massive force for repression: with 36,000 officers and 19,000 civilian employees, it’s larger than some national armies. This is the force that was brought onto the city’s university campuses in 2024 to crush the Gaza solidarity encampments.
Mamdani’s brand pivot from leftist firebrand to safe pair of hands for Wall Street is a predictable product of his political strategy. Mamdani isn’t running for mayor as a stunt to raise the profile of socialist ideas; he’s serious about winning the position. But the whole notion of a “socialist mayor of New York” is a contradiction in terms. Anyone in this position would be responsible for the actions of the country’s largest police force, and would be one of the city’s largest employers, in charge of negotiating wages with 330,000 government workers. They would have to maintain attractive conditions for business to invest in Wall Street, home to the most predatory corporations on the planet. In short, Mamdani seeks an executive position crucial to the functioning of US capitalism. 
The recent experience of Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, propelled by the city’s left and labour movement into office, should serve as a warning. Johnson induced unions to sign a no-strike pledge for the duration of 2024’s Democratic National Convention, while his police force attacked Palestine solidarity protesters outside it. The Chicago left that supported his candidacy has emerged from the experience discredited and demoralised. That was Chicago—the pressures exerted by big business and state bureaucrats will be far more intense in New York City.
Mamdani’s political program doesn’t express any real desire to confront these forces. Though he promotes supportable ideas for social reform, none of this is backed up by class struggle politics, even at a rhetorical level. Compared to previous prominent democratic socialists, Mamdani’s messaging lacks the combativity and sense of struggle that is the basic heart of socialism. 
Whereas Bernie Sanders framed his 2016 campaign as a confrontation with the power of the billionaire class, Mamdani implores the left to be “passionate about public excellence ... how we can make government more effective”. One of the objectives listed on his website is to “make it faster, easier, and cheaper to start and run a business”. His demands for rent controls and free bus rides, while progressive, are well within the parameters of traditional liberal conventions in New York. In fact, free crosstown buses were previously proposed by billionaire NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg. None of Mamdani’s proposals involves wresting away significant wealth and power from the ruling class. 
Mamdani declared in his victory speech that he hopes to be a “model” for the Democratic Party, pushing it to the left. This is the political approach championed by his organisation, the Democratic Socialists of America. In the US’ restrictive two-party system, leftists who prioritise office-holding above other objectives naturally gravitate toward working inside the Democratic Party, which offers the most immediate avenue for electoral success. But experience shows that instead of pushing the party to the left, participation in the Democratic Party pushes people like Mamdani to the right. They end up being coopted as part of the tamed “progressive” wing of a profoundly undemocratic party run by millionaires and billionaires. 
We’ve been here before. Wave after wave of progressives and self-described socialists have run insurgent campaigns inside the Democratic Party, which generate excitement and a sense of possibility, before quickly disappointing the hopes of their followers and finding a comfortable place in the establishment. 
In 2018, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s victory unleashed an avalanche of expectations on the left. But rather than “burning it down”, as one of her staffers promised, AOC instead championed the Biden administration’s right-wing domestic and international agenda, from voting to impose a unilateral employment contract on railway workers and quash their right to strike, to funding Israel’s Iron Dome. Politicians like AOC move swiftly from raising people’s political horizons to restraining them. There’s no evidence that Mamdani’s trajectory will overcome the pitfalls of his predecessors. 
His political strategy, promoted by the DSA, gets things completely back-to-front. Democratic Socialists recognise that public sentiment can be well to the left of the establishment. They see left-wing positioning as a means to win office, useful to the extent that it advances electoral gains. This is why DSA member and Jacobin magazine writer Eric Blanc lauded Mamdani for abandoning the demand to defund the police, which Blanc said would have affected his electability. This whole approach contrasts the radical view that participation in elections is important only to the extent that it can promote left-wing politics and social struggle. 
The DSA strategy envisions socialist organisations as cheer squads for elected officials, not vehicles that can act independently of whoever is in government. A co-chair of the New York City Democratic Socialists of America made this explicit in a recent interview: “The fate of DSA, and honestly, I think, the progressive movement in New York, is tied to Zohran’s administration, and we’re aware of that”. 
If the fate of the socialist movement in the heart of world capitalism relies on an individual who’s clearly ready to adapt to the structures of New York’s government, then the movement is in for a world of disappointment and demoralisation. 
Socialists can initiate movements for the demands Mamdani raised, such as rent controls, higher wages and taxes on the rich. But this has to start with a commitment to win people to a distinctly socialist strategy, separate from the major parties of US capitalism. 
Mamdani’s popularity reflects mass enthusiasm for left-wing politics, but this sentiment won’t go anywhere positive if it’s funnelled into yet another attempt to radicalise the Democratic Party.

The Mamdani moment

Trump cops a pasting in US election rebuke

Did Palestine set New York free?

The resurgent right in Latin America and the challenge for revolutionaries

Impressive result for socialists in WA council elections

On the campaign trail with WA Socialists

Setback for far-right Milei and advance for left in Argentina

Will a Communist be Chile’s next president?

Solid result for socialist candidates in local council by-elections

Can Zohran Mamdani advance socialism in the United States?

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